He was just off the autobahn, beaming at a rush-hour crowd, and Friedrich Merz’s mind had steered to speedometers.
“If you’ve recently bought a new car, have you noticed what kind of automatic systems it’s equipped with now?” the man in the driver’s seat to be Germany’s next chancellor asked on Friday afternoon. “If you drive two kilometers per hour too fast, the thing starts beeping.”
Those beeps are the product of a European Union regulation. For Mr. Merz, they were a timely and tidy example of the government intrusions that he blames for stymying the German economy and frustrating its citizens.
They were also a handy segue into the issues Mr. Merz hopes to lounge in, like a nice leather captain’s chair, over the final stretch before Germany’s parliamentary elections on Feb. 23.
Mr. Merz and his party, the conservative Christian Democrats, endured two nervous weeks after he took a political gamble and broke a decades-old taboo by voting with rivals on the far right in a failed bid to toughen migration laws.
Outcry followed. Rival candidates sensed an opening. But polls taken since the hubbub indicate that Mr. Merz has emerged relatively unscathed. Even if he is now seen as a more polarizing figure, the former businessman and longtime conservative stalwart seems once again to be cruising toward the chancellorship.
Mr. Merz is refocusing his stump speech on E.U. regulation, federal red tape, work ethics, energy costs and other ingredients of what business leaders call the components of a German competitive crisis. He is telling voters that an increasingly volatile world needs a stronger and steadier chancellor at the wheel than Germany’s current leader, Olaf Scholz, of the center-left Social Democrats.
The price of Mr. Merz’s fraught detour into immigration politics, and the benefits of turning the campaign back to more friendly and familiar turf, were on display during the stop he made last week in the small western town of Stromberg, where the only restaurant open for lunch downtown was an ice-cream parlor.
About 1 in 6 workers are employed in manufacturing in the heavily wooded, wine-producing state, Rhineland-Palatinate. The state’s economy shrank by nearly 5 percent in 2023, government statistics show. A party official said the venue had been chosen in part because of its highway proximity, easy for attendees and Mr. Merz to reach by car. Many of the attendees said they had driven in from out of town.
They were greeted, as is increasingly the case for Mr. Merz these days, by protesters. Since Mr. Merz broke the taboo of working with the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, parts of which are classified by German intelligence as extremist, outraged voters have taken to following him from campaign stop to campaign stop. Some accuse Mr. Merz of working with Nazis. Others call him one.
“He is not suitable as a chancellor,” said Walter Witzke, one of about 150 protesters who gathered in near-freezing temperatures outside the gymnasium in Stromberg where Mr. Merz spoke. “He has made the biggest mistake by voting with the AfD now.”
Mr. Witzke carried a sign that read “five minutes until 1933,” a reference to the dawn of Germany’s Nazi era. His wife, Heike Witzke, who joined him at the protest, said she feared for the nation’s democracy — and was saddened by a the backlash against immigrants. “You should never give up hope, but at the moment it is very, very bad,” she said.
Ms. Witzke said most of her friends came from abroad, and that she bakes cookies to celebrate holidays with Muslim neighbors. “It works, we have no problems at all,” she said.
Inside the gymnasium, where an 11-piece jazz band warmed up the crowd with lounge-act hits, Mr. Merz’s supporters were far more concerned with immigrants who receive social assistance.
“This poverty migration, we are simply overburdened by it now,” said Elke Müller, an executive at a cosmetics company.
She said she was a fan of Mr. Merz and that it was acceptable for him to push the tougher immigration measures that the AfD voted for. “I think he has economic expertise,” she said. “He can assert himself. And you can rely on him. And he is trustworthy. And I think he is the right man for the time we have now.”
Polls suggest a plurality of voters agree. They show Mr. Merz and his party hovering around 30 percent support in the German electorate, a relatively low number for a would-be chancellor, but well ahead of his closest rival.
Some surveys suggested that the migration gambit cost Mr. Merz slightly with voters. Others found a slight gain. None suggest it fundamentally altered the race. According to the latest Politbarometer survey, 30 percent of Germans say they will vote for Mr. Merz’s party, 1 percentage point more than in the end of January. The AfD sits second, with the Social Democrats and Greens lagging behind.
Mr. Merz addressed the migration-vote controversy near the end of his speech, which stretched more than an hour. He defended his decision but vowed to never form a government with the AfD — a distinction that supporters like Ms. Müller said was important to them.
Mr. Merz called migration one of the critical issues facing the country, but he leaned more into his economic pitch, vowing to reduce taxes and regulations for businesses and to build new nuclear power reactors to reduce energy costs.
The local candidate who introduced Mr. Merz apologized that fire safety regulations had capped the number of attendees. She acknowledged the protesters, calling them a sign of democracy.
Mr. Merz told his audience that this month’s election would be a “directional election,” for Germany and the world.
“Perhaps we should take a quick look across national borders and take a brief moment to consider the situation around us,” he said at one point. He then listed global challenges, including “the war in Ukraine, an increasingly aggressive China, major problems in the cohesion of the European Union” and the new administration of President Trump.
Amid those challenges, he asked, “Where is Germany, actually?”
As Mr. Merz wrapped up, the last daylight faded over the autobahn. Cheers grew in the gymnasium. Outside, a few residents walked their dogs, gazing with befuddled expressions into the glow of the rally. Police officers huddled in twos and threes.
The protesters had all cleared out.
